Writing in 1651 Thomas Hobbes famously described life in the state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short.” While much of Hobbes’ work—and the larger field of political thought—has centered on reading the human side of that description, the phrase might also be taken to indicate elements of the lived natural world. Indeed, it is difficult to separate considerations of human life, law, and politics from the ecosystem that helps constitute them.

T. S. Eliot: Intersections and Influence

Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900

February 21-23, 2019, University of Louisville

In 2016, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa jointly announced the acquisition of the Bob Dylan Archive–an extraordinary collection of material that includes over 6,000 items, including recordings, manuscripts, film, notebooks and much more.  These materials have already begun to open up new ways of understanding not just Dylan and his work, but the broader history of popular music both in America and around the world.  Tulsa is already home to the Woody Guthrie Center and will soon welcome OKPOP, which will house collections related to Leon Russell, Wanda Jackson, Roy Clark, Bob Wills, and more.  The Bob Dylan Archive will thus rest at the center of a rich array of resources focused o

Insensitivity to the demands of childcare is nowhere explicitly codified in any academic department or organization, but the formal structures and informal customs of the modern academic organization produce a bias that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable members of the academic hierarchies. Scholarship and childcare compete for time and attention. Extracurricular expectations — conference travel, participation in departmental committees, archival research, interviews & campus visits, &c. — take on new dimensions of difficulty. Graduate stipends and adjunct pay are prohibitively inadequate for the costs of having and raising children, even when supplemented with secondary incomes.

The 50th NeMLA Annual Convention
March 21-24, 2019 - Washington, DC

Experiential Learning has been described as an innovative approach to pedagogy in the fields of literature, language, and composition. Proponents argue that integrating Experiential Learning opportunities such as public projects, the production of publications, partnerships with local organizations, volunteering, and field trips into the curriculum enable students to connect what they've learned in the classroom to the wider world. But the significance of the concept of experience in the scholarship on experiential learning, although far from self-evident, remains largely untheorized. In Songs of Experience, Martin Jay points out that in modern philosophy the concept of experience has taken on a range of meanings, sometimes to conflicting ends.

The classical-romantic debate (1816-1826) was a crucial moment for the definition of modern Italian literature. Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi and Alessandro Manzoni, while taking part in the discussion, express some of the key aspects of their poetics. These three authors, some of the most important in Italian literature, were deeply influenced by the debate; at the same time, they claimed their original positions, which are not completely identifiable as either Classicist or Romantic. Indeed, sometimes scholars have, for example, unduly classified Leopardi as a Romantic, even though he thought of himself as a Classicist.